'What emerged at the end of the evaluation was we had two good companies competing, and in the end we compared the details of how well the companies understood the finer points of the Archives' mission, and Lockheed was better,' said Ken Thibodeau, NARA's director of the ERA program. 'Both had promising architectures but Lockheed just made more progress to what we think we needed.'

Officials selected Lockheed over Harris Corp. after the two companies spent a combined $21 million over the last 12 months building prototype systems.

NARA expects Lockheed to launch ERA's initial operating capability by 2007 and have it fully operational by 2011.

'We will deliver an open, flexible and highly scalable solution,' said Don Antonucci, president of Lockheed Martin's Transportation and Security Solutions Division. 'ERA is the start of a new archiving solution.'

The biggest challenge Lockheed will face is to design a system that will evolve over time, Thibodeau said. 'Engineering methods don't always factor that in. Lockheed Martin showed us that their architecture can carry this into as many commercial off-the-shelf products as possible.'

Antonucci would not offer any specifics on ERA's technology, except to say it will be using open architecture.

NARA is considering locating the system at another agency to share the cost of communications lines and IT security. Thibodeau said NARA is in discussions with several agencies.

The system will help NARA deal with the deluge of electronic records agencies are producing each month. Officials estimated that the Defense Department alone will submit 1 billion electronic personnel files to NARA over the next 10 years.

Lockheed's version of ERA will store and maintain records in the format they were created in to retain the records' authenticity. NARA estimates that agencies use more than 4,800 different formats.